Max Well and Adam Lamb
Mike: How did you guys meet?
Alex Lamb: Max and I met at Chapman University and he shot my senior thesis project Somewhere Over the Flagpole: A Nintendo Movie, which was the very first time we worked together. We’ve worked together ever since, forming Surf Monkey Films in 2009, shooting music videos, commercials, and some children’s programming.
Max Well: Alex and I met in film school, at the Dodge College at Chapman University. It has a great reputation now, thanks to the Duffer Brothers who made the hit series Stranger Things, and others who were there when we attended. I think we realized early on that we complimented each other. Alex is very creative; he has wonderful ideas and is very detail-oriented when it comes to story. These skills have served him well as an editor, which he is by trade. I’ve always been interested in the technical side of filmmaking, and focused on cinematography. Over the years of working together we developed a mutual trust, and a respect that allows us to freely discuss ideas, and most importantly to honestly talk about whether or not something is working.
Don the Beachcomber
Mike: How did you become interested in Don the Beachcomber?
Alex: During Covid we were both unemployed. I’m an editor by trade and Max is a cinematographer. I was already very interested in Tiki and had been trying to master my mixology skills while in quarantine. Living in LA, I knew all the Tiki Bars that I loved going to were shut down and I thought it would be a cool project to do a short docu-series on the history of these bars, interviewing the people who run them and learning their stories. Max and I set out to film a couple bars and everyone’s interview started out the same, “Well none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for Don the Beachcomber.” From there we decided, even if only half of these stories are true, Donn’s story would be an amazing documentary in its own right.
Max: During the Covid lockdown, we set out to create a couple of shorts about the old Tiki bars in L.A. They are visually interesting, and we were genuinely interested in the history. As we started doing research and talking with folks in the Tiki community, we kept hearing about Donn Beach. He’s revered as this kind of legendary figure by a lot of people. His life hasn’t been very well documented, and there are a lot of stories that are hard to believe. The more we learned, the more we were intrigued. We thought, OK, this is something we can kick off on our own. You know, we have a little bit of equipment and we have the experience to go out with a small crew and shoot what we need. So, it was sort of one of those things where, before we realized that this was going to be a feature movie, we were already doing it and it just kind of grew and evolved from there.
Mike: Was it difficult to find investors?
Alex: Investors are kind of off the table because people don’t really want to invest in anything that’s not a proven concept. So, we went out and started interviewing. Somebody early on had given us the advice to just start shooting, because with a documentary, you’re constantly shooting and constantly chasing money. We just started shooting it so we could show that we were capable of doing. We put together a sizzle reel out of this stuff and we started posting stuff online. We started a Kickstarter campaign with the goal to raise $50,000. We figured if we got $50,000, we could travel to some of these bars that are further away, like Jeff Berry’s bar in New Orleans or some bars in New York. We could visit some of these places and have the travel expenses paid for. And then our Kickstarter campaign was much more successful than we anticipated and we ended up raising about $200,000.
Well and Lamb crafted the film around interviews with people who knew Donn or know of him and an audio recording of Donn Beach, talking about his life. The interviews are with friends, relatives, former employees, ex-wives and a Who’s Who of bar owners, drink historians and Tiki elite. One of the first interviews in the film is with Tim “Swanky” Glazner who has been researching Don the Beachcomber for years. We see Tim digging through piles of photographs and stacks of boxes.
Mike: In the interview with Tim Glazner, are all of those boxes filled with Don the beachcomber memorabilia?
Max: Yes, that’s Donn’s archive of documents, photographs, diaries, DVD’s. Phoebe, his widow, had been carrying this archive with her to all the different houses she has lived in, in different countries, not wanting to get rid of it, hoping that someday it would be useful for a book or whatever. We got hooked up with Tim through Phoebe. We had read a book about Don the Beachcomber that was written by a man named Arnold Bitner who was also married to Phoebe. We researched the publishing company and they got us in touch with Phoebe. Arnold had, unfortunately, passed away by the time we started working on this project. But once we got in touch with Phoebe and talked to her on the phone, we just kind of hit it off. She trusted us and we were really excited to meet her and felt good about working with her. She still had this archive and she told us about Tim and his project to write a book. She got us in communication with him. You know, there were a lot of photos and blueprints and what not that were personal items of Donn’s that nobody had ever seen before.
Throughout the film, we hear the actual voice of Donn Beach telling his life story. The audio recording was an interview with Donn conducted by Alice Siweky for the Watmul Oral History Foundation. Where actual film footage of certain events did not exist, they creatively used 2D (cartoon) and Stop-Motion animation to fill the gaps.
Mike: How did you decide on using animation and what it should look like?
Max: We knew that we lacked visuals for some important parts of the story. We didn’t have enough archival footage or images or news clippings to cover every part of the film, and you can only stay on interviews for so long. We thought that animation could work to help fill in these sections, but we were on a tight budget, and didn’t really want to use animation if it didn’t look good.
Alex: I remember early on talking about what the animation should look like and we kept getting stumped. We thought something mid-century would fit because Tiki is so connected with the mid-century modern architecture and culture. But it didn’t make sense to have a mid-century style Donn bootlegging in the 1920s. At one point, I remember saying to Max, “If we had the money, but we don’t, it would be really cool if we used different styles animation for the different decades of Donn’s life”. We talked to about five different animation studios in Los Angeles, and got laughed out of the office (Zoom meeting) by each one when they heard our budget. We had kind of given up on the idea of different styles of animation when we realized how expensive it would be. Then Max met Christopher Ninness, who was working on the documentary Not Just A Goof, who told him about this amazing animation studio that they worked with in Columbia called Venutria Animation Studios. We set up a meeting with their Creative Director Juan Urbina, who started the meeting with, “I’ve been doing some research on Donn, and I read your outline, I have this idea: what if we used a different style of animation for each decade of Donn’s life?”
Max: The stop-motion came about as a way to utilize more of the Donn Beach audio recordings. We loved hearing him tell his own story, but we needed strong visuals to accompany his voice. Evan Berger, a friend of ours, had created a miniature version of the original Don the Beachcomber location which we shot for a sequence in the film, so we had a pre-built set. When Alex had the idea to utilize stop motion, it seemed like a perfect fit. We were already shooting many of our interview subjects in Tiki bars. Why not record Donn Beach in his own Don the Beachcomber bar? We worked with a wonderful artist, Kevin Kidney, of Kevin and Jody, to design the stop-motion puppet, and a team of very talented animators at Mystery Meat Media up in Oakland, to figure out exactly how this all would work. To make a long story short, it didn’t. Not at first anyway. The scale we had used for the bar was impractical for the puppet. He needed to be large enough so that the animators could easily move his eyebrows, mouth, and other features. We had to shoot background plates of the set, and determine what lens and distance we needed to shoot the puppet to be properly composited into the background. It was a technical mess, but we’re happy with the result!
As a young man, Donn’s father offered to pay for a college degree or a trip around the world. Donn chose the trip. It was these travels that shaped his future. He would combine rums and simple cocktails from the Caribbean, artifacts and decorations from though out Polynesia and Cantonese food to create the phenomenon we call Tiki. He took the basic Caribbean Planter’s Punch recipe of One of Sour, Two of Sweet, Three of Strong and Four of Weak and drilled down on each component. Sour could be Lemon, Grapefruit, Lime or a combination. Sweet could be light sugar, dark sugar, honey, Agave, maple syrup. Strong could be rums or a combination of rums from islands throughout the Caribbean. The Weak would be ice, but he played with the type, the shape and the amount. Then, he added a fifth element, spices. Over time he would create over fifty ‘Rum Rhapsodies.’
Mike: Why do you think Donn chose rum for the majority of his drinks?
Alex: I think, in the public sphere, that rum was not nearly as popular at that point as the other spirits, like whiskey and gin. It just so happened that it was available in greater quantity and easier to get. Donn was involved in some rum running and he had a bunch of rum when prohibition ended. I think that was basically why he was using rum as his spirit, because it was plentiful and he already had a lot of it.
Max: He had a unique knowledge about rum from his days traveling in his 20’s. He knew how to make a Planters Punch and a Daiquiri and these rum drinks weren’t quite as popular in the US as they were in other parts of the world. He was able to package rum in a way that the public was willing to try and say, “oh, this is, this is interesting.”
Mike: Donn was a man of many stories. Was it difficult to make a documentary about a man when his stories were often conflicting?
Alex: Personally, I kept having a conceptual crisis, thinking that if nothing Donn says is true, then nothing in the documentary is true. So, what’s the point? Max always did a good job of pulling me out of that hole. Eventually we decided that if we could portray Donn as an unreliable narrator in the beginning of the film, it sort of gave us a “get out of jail free card” for the rest of the documentary.
Max: There’s a very important introduction to the film that tells the audience in one minute who Donn Beach is, and at the end the narrator says “What follows is this man’s story. Or, at the very least, the story he’d like us to believe.” This line serves two purposes. First of all, it sets the tone of the film. It lets the audience know that it’s okay to laugh. And most importantly, it suggests that some of what we are about to hear is Donn’s version of events. That element of “what he’d like us to believe” is something that we leaned into in the film. As much as we could, we tried to verify through documentation what actually happened, but some information has just been lost to time, or we found multiple versions of the same story. Ultimately, we separated everything in the film into three categories: the things we know to be true, the things that we believe happened based on the best available information, and lastly, stories that Donn tells us, which may be true. Or maybe not. The audience can decide.
Mike: You have been traveling across the country in 2025 screening the film. Will that continue in 2026? What’s next for The Donn of Tiki?
Max: We’ve been touring around the country this year (2025) and will have screened in about 30 cities by the middle of December. I think we’re going to continue this probably into the first quarter of next year. We already have screenings scheduled for Vancouver on February 3rd, Seattle on February 4th and Birmingham on the 7th. We’re also working on a Blu-ray DVD release and probably streaming shortly after that.
Mike: Will the DVD have bonus material?
Max: It will definitely have some bonus material. We are collecting a lot of material now and we are in the process of organizing special features and some sequences that we really liked, but were dropped from the film due to time. The DVD-Blu Ray will certainly have a lot of this material. There will be director commentaries, deleted scenes, some cocktail recipe videos, some behind the scenes featurettes.
Mike: We will, look forward to that. I have one last question. After making the film and working with Tiki bars across the country to promote it, Alex, are you making better drinks now?
Alex: I think I am. You know, when you’re done doing interviews and screenings, afterwards, it’s like “great, we’re done, let’s make cocktails”, and you have these great drinks personally made by these amazing bartenders and you, you learn a lot for sure.
To see a trailer for The Donn of Tiki and to get information of upcoming screenings and the release of the DVD, check out their website: https://www.thedonnoftiki.com/